Rather like Andy Burnham, you can imagine a younger version of Zia Yusuf being sent into Love Island in the third week – when things are getting a bit comfy between the youthful love-seekers – as a ‘bombshell’ to freshen things up a bit (probably the only thing they have in common). Looking like a Disney prince – the modern, inclusive kind, not the boring old blond-haired blue-eyed type – you can see the girls getting all a-flutter over this dashing self-made swell who suddenly makes the humdrum Tylers and Jordans look a bit too boy-next-door.
All the ladies would be hoping to be picked for the romantic dinner, but as the also-rans peep over the parapet, their envy of the chosen girl starts to wane. Isn’t the dark-eyed charmer a little…boastful? Loves the sound of his own voice, to the extent of talking over his date? Seems insufficiently appreciative of the feast-for-two? By the time she returns for a squealing girly debriefing, Zia’s pick is a little disenchanted. ‘He’s my type on paper…but if you’ve been to Tenerife, he’s been to Elevenerife!’ And so the dreaded ‘ick’ spreads among the villa’s female population.
William Atkinson recently put it another way in these pages:
There is something sulphurous about Zia Yusuf. The deep-set, unblinking eyes; the ardent belief in his own mission; the position as a Rasputin at the court of Tsar Nigel Farage; a fervid, prophetic interloper…reader, he terrifies me.
I also see Zia as ‘Zorro’, hero of many a cinema matinee. You can imagine him in tight trousers and a big hat, masked up, waving his rapier around before using it to carve the initial ‘Z’ on vanquished foes. But however one regards him, in his pomposity and posturing, there can be little doubt that Zia Yusuf is now the most preposterous personality in British politics – and therefore to be welcomed, after the profound dreariness of the world’s least amusing double-act, Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer.
Yusuf’s haughtiness is off the scale
He seemed so perfect at first sight: what better inoculation against the frequent charges of racism levelled against Reform UK than a man born Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf to a family of Sri Lankan Muslims? True, he forsook the family tradition of public service (father a paediatrician, mother a nurse – both in the NHS, brother a radiologist and sister in education) in favour of making a shedload of money in banking, but that came in handy to Mr Farage’s merry men too.
After rising to the position of executive director of Goldman Sachs, in 2014 Yusuf co-founded a ‘luxury concierge company’ called Velocity Black, which sounds like both an upmarket condom and a Bond Girl. In 2023, he sold it for more than £230 million; what an enchanted evening it was for Nigel when he met the Muslim multi-multimillionaire at a cocktail party. Yusuf became the largest donor to Reform as they geared up for the 2024 election, soon succeeding Richard Tice as chairman of the party. Naughtily, he remained a member of the Conservative party during all this; he ‘mugged them off’ – in Love Island parlance – until they crossly revoked his membership in the summer of 2024 after the Guardian snitched on him.
But within a year, there was trouble in paradise. Yusuf appeared to have something of an ‘aggy’ (Island-speak for aggravated) temperament. There had been rumbles of this when the BBC reported allegations of ‘unpredictable’ behaviour by our humble hero during the Velocity Black years, alongside frequent dismissals and frightened employees.
Last summer, Yusuf famously resigned from the party, with the magnificently – and somewhat comical – words ‘I no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time.’ From Love Island to Hyacinth Bucket! Whether coincidentally or not, it came shortly after the Reform MP Sarah Pochin mooted a ban on the burqa, in line with other European countries; Yusuf called it ‘dumb’. But two days later, he was back, with a shiny new position leading the party’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ – and a new view on banning the burqa, which he now apparently agreed with.
We all hoped that Zia might settle down and play nice now. But as Tim Shipman wrote earlier this week:
Yusuf also seems compelled to feud with enemies, external and (wearingly) internal. ‘Zia did not talk to me for three months when he found out I was involved in bringing Jenrick over,’ says Tim Montgomerie. ‘You cannot behave like a child in politics.
Montgomerie is not alone. ‘At any given point, the list of people that Zia is not speaking to tends to be longer than the list of those to whom he is,’ says another insider. ‘And if you do have the misfortune to be on the list of those he is speaking to, you can rest assured that you’ll soon be back on the banned list.’
In an extraordinary measure of the intense feelings Yusuf generates, a Reform insider says: ‘Zia is an omni-c***. It’s not personal. He’s just like it to everyone.
Calling Sir Ben Wallace ‘a traitor’, as Yusuf did earlier this month, was a shocking piece of misjudgement. A man who devoted his early life to making money should not so much as look askance in public at a man who, at a similar age, was mentioned in dispatches for commanding a patrol in Belfast which captured an entire IRA active service unit about to carry out a bomb attack on our troops.
Flouncing in political life is great fun for the spectator. (And The Spectator.) So is petulance. But that combination, when demonstrated by someone near the head of a party, is likely to bring it into ridicule pretty damn quickly. Reform have already weathered Binheadgate with the Clacton by-election; they don’t need another reason for the sketch-writers to sharpen their quills.
Though having Andy Burnham going after you might be a bit like being savaged by a barm-cake, Kemi Badenoch is approaching the peak of her powers and has reason to intensely dislike Reform. It may well be true, as Tim Montgomerie said, that ‘Nigel [Farage] has fallen out of love with Zia’. But the pair would do well to keep their argie-bargies, set-tos and ding-dongs on the down-low, and not get ‘salty’ while the whole villa looks on, apparently aghast but loving it.
Yusuf is very handsome, but as a Reform insider told Tim Shipman, ‘There’s no way around it. Zia doesn’t play well with women.’ It’s easy to imagine quite a few working-class Northern Reform women being attracted back to Labour by Burnham, who for all his faults doesn’t seem arrogant.
Yusuf’s haughtiness is off the scale; he sacked the estimable Gawain Towler – who had spent two decades working for Eurosceptic causes – while sitting close to him in the Reform offices, getting a functionary to take him to an adjoining room and inform him that he should clear his desk and leave promptly. Towler later said: ‘We give up our free time, we do all this and we’re still treated like dirt.’ Little wonder that Stephen Pollard wrote recently that:
It sometimes seems as if every time he opens his mouth it is an embarrassment either for Yusuf or Reform… the more the public sees of Yusuf, I am convinced, the more difficult it will become for Reform to convert a poll lead into government.
If Farage cannot control his explosive bombshell over the coming months, it’s very likely that the ick will lead to a monumental ‘pieing off’ for Reform by the British electorate.
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